Sound Exchange - Turning classical music on its head

Today's stories are about success, innovation, and answers to major world problems. It is an honor to be here but achievement is not the only part of my story. I am here partially because I have failed. So, how do we define failure? Failure can be defined as failing short of an objective. But here is the thing. Coming from the arts, we don't have objectives; we have dreams. So our definition of failure is falling short of a dream. And as artists, our dreams are big; they are fuel by passion and they really leave no room for practicality. Our dreams in a way become who we are as people. I started dreaming when I was about eleven in the sixth grade. My band teacher handed me this spiraly instrument and told me to play it. I had no idea what it was but I thought it looked cool so I said I would try it. At first, nothing I did actually resembled music. But what I remember most vividly the first time I sat in an orchestra. As the conductor's hands started to wave, this amazing energy erupted from within in the orchestra. I was totally shocked. When my mom picked me up I remember saying "Mom, that can't be real!" To me, music was this key in to an invisible world that I had never seen before. A world that was full of overwhelming wonder, excitement, and beauty. To me, music represented a world of infinite possibility. I became obsessed with music and like any Type A student I practiced the horn as much as I possibly could, and I was successful. I got into major festivals and I got into Eastman. But about six years ago things started to unravel. I came to Eastman as an undergrad and it soon became apparent that the way I played, my embrasure, which allows me to do this (blows through mouthpiece) was faulty. And if I wanted to have a sustainable career as a performer I would have to completely relearn how to play in a healthier way. This is kind of like if you are walking and someone comes up to you and says "you cannot walk like that anymore." Your response might be, "well what do you mean? This is how I have always walked and I can't really imagine walking any other way." Walking is something that we do so often and comes so naturally to us that we do not actually know how we do it. For me as a junior in college, I had to go back to square one and sound like a sixth grader again who could barely make a sound. And for me that was totally devastating. Something I had done hundreds if not thousands of times felt totally different. My instrument, my key into the world of music, started to feel like a foreign object. I tried as hard as I could to practice and get better and things did get better. They got worse. They got better. But they really never returned to the way they were for the first ten or so years of my career as a French hornist. I fought as hard as I could but eventually my dream and at the time my identity slipped away and I had to put this on the side. But my failure is not the only one. Musicians for the past centuries have spent countless hours perfecting classical music and we have done something really amazing with this tradition. We have top notch symphony orchestras all over the country and we have elite institutions like Eastman and Julliard that train young musicians to become part of this really high art form. We study classical music- the theory, the history, and the performance art- almost to the point of perfection. But when we look at statistics it is really only about ten percent of the population in the United States that engages in live classical music. Ten percent! Statistics show that number is actually shrinking. And that audience base is aging very fast. Not only that, but this audience represents an incredibly narrow demographic. Audiences for classical music are mostly white, mostly wealthy, older, and usually possess a high level of education. If we go back to the definition of failure, falling short of an objective, what is our objective for classical music? What is our dream for this art form? If our dream is to create this perfect beautiful art, then we have succeeded. We really have; there are amazing orchestras all over the country. But what especially as young musicians, do we want to do about the orchestras that are folding or filing for bankruptcy, the funding problems, the diminishing audiences? Is the point of classical music to sell a certain number of tickets? Or is it to train young musicians like all of us to play note perfect concerts in these pristine concert halls for basically wealthy white people? What is our goal for music? I said failure is falling short of an objective. And I think sometimes we fall short because of incompetence or lack of trying hard enough, but sometimes we fall short because we just misdefined our goal. In that case, I think failure really becomes an opportunity for revolution, for major change. For me, I thought my goal was to just play the French horn, but failure made me question my role in music. I realized that I really want to share the magic that music reveals in the world. And this instrument was just my key into that world, but I want to make sure other people find their own key into the world of music. I think classical music, maybe our goal has been to create this beautiful perfect art. But I think our goal should be to create a totally transformative experience. So in 2011, myself and a group of Eastman students started Sound ExChange and our sole purpose, making this group, was to create transformative experiences and share them with audiences all over Rochester. That's our only goal. And we were basically willing to break all rules to make this happen. Our first goal was to erase that invisible line that separates the performer and the audience. At our first concerts, we actually invited the audience to come sit in the orchestra, right next to the musicians. Then the audience could watch the conductor, they could watch the musicians, but they also got really close to that electric energy that we all feel as performers inside the orchestra. We also thought that if we want to create a total experience for our listeners, we could maybe find allies in other art forms. We have launched collaborations with dancers, visual artists and multimedia artists to kind of bring new perspectives into the concert experience. This has also added an element of surprise. We also decided that we do not want to just assume people will come to our concerts in our concert halls. We wanted to travel to unexpected venues and play for new audiences. Sound ExChange has performed all over Rochester. In the picture behind me, we are at ARTISANworks but we have also played for sick people in hospitals, audiences of all ages at the planetarium, and the public market. And our goal has been to connect them as closely we can to the music we play. Some of our shows have sold out but at some of our shows we really only play for one or two people. An example of that is at Strong Memorial Hospital. One story that I love from our partnership there is we played one time on the new cancer wing. And there was only one woman in this waiting room and she was there waiting to go see her husband. She said, "You know this new facility is beautiful; it is amazing, but there is something that is still very cold about it." And so we brought one cellist in and she said, "Just having this one instrument here adds a whole new element of warmth." Just having music there for that one person that day made her day better. Again, our goal with Sound ExChange is to bring the human element into music and connect audiences to music as closely as we can. For us, that does not mean playing what everyone else defines as classical music. We actually embrace all genres and time periods of music. One concert we might be playing Bach and Beethoven, another concert might be made up of an arrangement of popular music or contemporary music. This is the result we have gotten before. This is Suzanne and she has been with Sound ExChange from the very beginning. Displaying picture. This is one of our first orchestra concerts and she is sitting, as you can see, with our musicians. After this concert, she emailed me and said, "That was an utterly transformative experience, an unbelievable thrill." Her smile- as performers that is the smile we get when we play. This is direct proof that we can break down the barriers between musicians, audiences, and music and really get to that core element of what makes music special. I think Sound ExChange represents a shift in goals for me and for music. The platform we have created for Sound ExChange actually embraces failure because we cannot continue to try new things and have everything go perfectly. We actually have to fail. It is my hope that this approach will encourage musicians and audiences to take bigger risks that hopefully will result in more meaningful ways to share music.